Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Well the first meeting was held in Bangor on Tuesday. I spoke with a reporter from channel 7 news and she played one quote from me asking how children would be protected when most Former SOs would be at jobs during the day when children where at school or the playground and not there a night where the RFSOs would be at home sleeping. Plus I was able to correct the reporters misinformation of a 60% recidivism rate. She used the the 3-5% rate found in most studies conducted by the US Department of Justice's own studies. So I think I had a least a small bit of influence with the one reporter.
Tonight I decided to see what I could find out about the woman who is pushing for this ordinance. Her name is Angela Hoy and she is a writer. She also has a blog here: http://vbac.angelahoy.com/. She is sadly misinformed and is pushing her hatred of RFSOs because two members of her family were molested. She would like to hear from people who have questions and read her blog. She can be written to at angela@writersweekly.com. I am planning on sending her an e-mail with correct information in it, especially the part about why anyone would oppose herordinance. So I encourage everyone who reads this to also write to her, nicely but firmly. There are further meetings on this proposal on August 10th at the next city council meeting. I also encourage you to write e-mails to the city couselors and to follow the e-mails with a letter.

Friday, July 2, 2010

Here's an important alert to everyone living in around and near Bangor. And to the rest of us because if one town passes residency restrictions then others will follow suit. In many states these kinds of reaatrictions have forced people to live under bridges andin tent cities on the outskirts of communities.In one midwestern state a homeless man froze to death because both local shelters were too near schools and the were forced to turn him away. The Bangor Homeless Shelter is across the street from a park, will this new ordinance cause a simular event? If you live close enough it would be a good idea to plan on attending the city planning meetings and to get up and speak up! I know it won'tbe comfortable but keeping silent doesn't work either. I have attended several local town meetings in my area, things can get heated. But someone needs to spoke the truth not just hear the hate and emotions. If anyone plans to speak and wants or needs help planing what to say ahead of time please contact me @ ladyfurebear@yahoo.com and I can pass along facts and staticistics and even help edit.

BANGOR, Maine — State legislators passed a law last year that allows municipalities to adopt reasonable residency restrictions for registered sex offenders. Bangor resident Angela Hoy was amazed to learn recently — after a sex offender moved into her neighborhood — that her city didn’t already have restrictions in place.

Hoy recently asked a lawyer to draft a proposed ordinance that would restrict sex offenders in Bangor from living within 750 feet of a park, school or any other place where children are the primary users. Her proposal mirrors the exact limit that was spelled out by LD 385 last year.

Members of the Bangor City Council’s government operations committee are expected to discuss Hoy’s proposal at a meeting on July 13, but officials said the matter is much more complicated than simply imposing restrictions.

“It would be problematic in a number of ways,” said Dennis Marble, executive director of the Bangor Area Homeless Shelter. His facility on Main Street houses sex offenders from time to time and sits directly across the street from Davenport Park. “We’ve always tried to be thoughtful of who we accept, but my concern is that local unilateral actions have unintended consequences.”

Denise Lord, associate commissioner of the Maine Department of Corrections, said there are no data that suggest enforcing residency restrictions on sex offenders is successful.

“The research is clear that restrictions don’t improve public safety,” she said. “In fact, areas that have imposed restrictions have had negative impacts … like pushing offenders underground.”Hoy lives near a park off Newbury Street in Bangor and discovered recently that a sex offender lived in an apartment overlooking the park. As the mother of a 3-year-old, an 8-year-old and a teenager, she was alarmed.

“We thought it was illegal for sex offenders to live near parks, schools, and other places where children congregate,” she said. “I'm sure other parents in Bangor naively believe that as well.” Hoy’s proposal would permit offenders to live in their current residences if they happen to fall within the 750-foot barrier. There are currently 209 registered sex offenders living in Bangor, according to the state’s online sex offender registry.

There is no statewide law regarding where sex offenders can live, although some offenders can have restrictions as part of their conditions of release. Until LD 385 passed, municipalities were free to impose virtually any restrictions they wanted. Some did, although several others were rejected by courts for being too restrictive, including a 2,500-foot ordinance in Westbrook that was struck down.

The 750-foot limit that was agreed upon was a compromise from the state’s initial proposal that sought to prevent municipalities from adopting any restrictions.

“We were concerned about the growing number of inconsistent ordinances,” Lord said. “Each town was getting a little more restrictive than the next, so we thought a standardized statewide [criterion] was a good compromise.”

Kate Dufour with the Maine Municipal Association, which worked to ensure the compromise, agreed. “The initial proposal was a complete preemption of local authority,” she said. “It was [the state] saying we know best. This is an important issue for municipalities, and we did give up some home rule authority.”

Dufour emphasized that she understands that sex offenders have rights and shouldn’t be driven underground where they cannot access resources they need. Hoy said she was concerned about the high number of sex offenders living in Bangor, but officials said service centers always have more offenders because of the rental housing stock, jobs, transportation and other services such as counseling.

Shawn Yardley, Bangor’s director of health and community services, predicted that the residency restriction debate will be interesting among city councilors, but he didn’t offer a strong recommendation.

“The devil would be in the details,” said Yardley, who worked for the state Department of Health and Human Services for 17 years. “Certainly, I would want to look at categories of sex offenders, rather than to put them all on the same level. It should be a thoughtful process of balancing rights and making them workable, but it’s a tough one.”

Yardley said one could draw concentric 750-foot circles around Bangor’s parks, schools and other areas where children congregate and it probably wouldn’t leave many housing options.

City Council Chairman Richard Stone said he hasn’t thought that much about restrictions on sex offenders but would go into the discussion with an open mind. Hoy has a more personal investment in the issue. She has two immediate family members who were molested as children and said that is why she feels so strongly about protecting children.

“We are determined to fight this and to force the Bangor City Council to pass an ordinance restricting residency of sex offenders in Bangor,” she said. Lord said she understands the concerns of parents like Hoy but also said those concerns don’t always match up with reality.

“Despite what people think, recidivism rates [for sex offenders] are low and when they do reoffend, the victim is known to the perpetrator,” she said. “So if the public wants to take precautions, family members can and should do that. But it’s much easier to manage when you know where offenders are, rather than forcing them underground, which is what happens when restrictions are imposed.”

Marble agreed and pointed to the very public case in Florida recently where dozens of sex offenders were forced to live under a bridge because they had nowhere else to go.

“The cycle we’re in right now is one of fear and anger, and we’re looking for people to blame,” he said. “They are an easy target.”

Saturday, April 17, 2010

I recieved notice of this amzing fact from serveral people but Mary from Virginia had the most research and presented the most evidence of this. It is sad enough that a young girl was killed and raped but now the mother is on a vendeta to chase Former Sex Offenders out of her community by falsly claiming the man arrested for this crime was a Former Sex Offender. Now the media is going out and claiming he was one also. The other day on a 20/20 repost even people within our movement thought that he was a former offender after watching it. They did such a good job presenting falsehoods as fact that every one believed them. Only some asstute watchers questioned their facts and did the research and learned the truth. Many people are writing to the media outlets and letting them know we don't appreciate being lied to. Read on for the full story.....

In the last few days of reading articles to post we've noticed the U.S. Media is now saying Somer Thompson's accused killer is a Sex Offender by either claiming he’s “convicted” or if the Sex Offenders hadn’t been allowed to live in Somer’s neighborhood her murder could have been prevented.

We are extremely disappointed in 20/20 and CBS for knowingly misleading their viewers and readers.
It’s the media's responsibility to deliver facts even when a distraught mother wants to twist those facts.

Monday, March 15, 2010

I came across the link to this story on Free Range Kids, a must read if you haven't found this blog yet. They titled their story with "What will they think of next?" I wonder when we will hear this of a scheme like as the newest best way to monitor people who come into contact with our children? They've taken it from a list of Former Offenders online to one where everyone can be checked. Potentially even reporting false or unfounded accusations as facts. Read on.....

The government’s sex offenders disclosure scheme should remind us that it isn’t ‘the mob’ who are obsessed with paedos (not a misspelling but the way they spell it in the UK).Tim Black
And so the British authorities’ sick obsession with child sex abuse continues.
After a year-long pilot in Warwickshire, Stockton-on-Tees and parts of Cambridgeshire, the UK Home Office’s sex offender disclosure scheme is set to go nationwide. What this means is that parents will be able to get information from the police about anyone who has access to their children. In short, they can check whether that person is a threat to their child – that is, whether they are a paeodophile. A kindly neighbour offering sweets, the guy who plays football with the kids at the local park, the woman at the nearby newsagents… it’s official: all can now be legitimately viewed as potential threats to YOUR children.
For deathly-looking home secretary Alan Johnson the rolling out of the sex offender disclosure scheme was akin to the launch of a new fleet of luxury, ocean-going ships: ‘The UK already has one of the most robust systems in the world for the management of sex offenders’, he announced yesterday, with barely concealed pride. ‘We’ve already seen that children are better protected and sex offenders more effectively managed because of this scheme, which is why it is rolling out nationwide.’
Yet despite the rhetorical appeal to ‘protection’ or ‘safety’, these kinds of measures do not reassure people. In fact, they do precisely the opposite: they encourage fear and foster suspicion. They suggest that if people aren’t worried about the lolly-pop man, or the neighbour offering to run the kids to school, they ought to be. To not fear, to not suspect other adults, is subtly transformed from being a recognition of commonality and basic human solidarity into an abrogation of parental responsibility.
Not that we should be surprised by the Home Office’s willingness to inculcate and institutionalise fear and suspicion. The paedophile panic, right from its emergence in its current form during the 1980s, was always an elite panic, a hysteria endorsed and exacerbated by – in no particular order – government officials, police officers, social workers, left-wing activists, children’s charities and both the broadsheet and tabloid press. The obsession with child sex abuse was not, as we are sometimes led to believe, a popular phenomenon: it did not arise in the depths of the social world, it trickled down from the top.
After all, as Brendan O’Neill wrote four years ago, it wasn’t the mob who, in the 1980s, rounded up adults in Cleveland, believing them to be practising ritual Satanic abuse of children. That was the act of social workers. And it wasn’t a paedo-suspecting mass who spent time churning out verbiage on the supposed existence of Satanic and witchcraft sects. That was the work of Marxism Today.
During the 1990s the same pattern of elite-sponsored fear and the subsequent issuing of false accusations was all too apparent. And again, it wasn’t local communities coming together to unmask the paedophiles at nearby children’s homes, such as Bryn Estyn in North Wales – it was an unholy alliance of purpose-seekers, from the police to left-leaning journalists. Dave Jones, then the manager of Southampton Football Club, was only the most famous casualty of these witch-hunts; the lives of many more innocent, well-intentioned care workers were also tainted with the nasty, grubby suspicions of officials and journalists.
However, these wrong-headed, pernicious pursuits of fantasy child sex abusers did nothing to dampen the ardour of the paedophile-obsessed. In the UK, we now have that unwieldy testament to elite suspicion, the Sex Offenders Register, a document that defies both natural justice, inasmuch as punishment is lifelong, and common sense, given the sheer range of offenders listed. And since 2006, any adult who works with children, anywhere from schools to youth clubs, now has to be vetted. Thanks to the Home Office, and the army of campaign groups such as the NSPCC, suspecting another adult of being a paedophile is not exceptional – it is routine.
The fact that even the popular face of the campaign behind the sex offender disclosure scheme, Sara Payne (the mother of Sarah Payne, the young girl killed in 2001 by a convicted paedophile), was chosen by the government as its official Victim Champion, illustrates the elite origins of this sorry fascination with child sex abuse. It must be galling for the Home Office, then, that despite the formalisation of suspicion and fear, despite the almost-weekly press releases by those scaremongers-in-chief at the NSPCC, so few people actually bothered to take advantage of the sex offender disclosure scheme during its trial. In fact, there were only 315 applications over a whole year, a figure so low that even the Home Office wondered whether the scheme was worth it.
The Home Office, campaign groups, charities, tabloids and broadsheets seem oblivious to the fact that their attempts to ‘protect children’ not only have a limited effect – they also corrode adult relationships. One does not just suspect the dodgy-looking fella at the park; one is encouraged to suspect neighbours and even friends. These measures undermine trust. Trusting another adult, whether the neighbour with the sweets or the guy at the park, is not something that can be guaranteed by an official intermediary, police or otherwise. It relies, rather, on assuming that other adults are like oneself and will behave likewise. And given that almost all of us are not interested in sexually abusing children, why should we constantly suspect others?Tim Black is senior writer at spiked.

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Today's Witch Hunt

Cartoon from the Portland Press Herald

Welcome to Maine CFC

I wanted to take a minute and welcome you to this blog. Eventually we will have a website but until then this is a way to let everyone know what's going on. Please contact me @ ladyfurebear@yahoo.com for more information, how to join our group, or if you have a link, story or other information you'd like to share with us.RegardsMaine State Coordinator for ME CFCNational CFCRSOLLaws and Research

ME CFC Goals

1. As a group we will seek to reduce recidivism by reforming public policy and encouraging people to live offense free lives: by offering support to Former Offenders and their families; through networking, education and other areas of need. 2. Develop a core group that attends each and every committee and work session where relevant bills are being developed or voted on.3. Our group will seek to educate the media, the public, the Legislature and the Governor on the facts vs the myths concerning the Registry and it's effects on everyone including not only the Former Offender and their families but on the community as a whole. a. Develop a positive working relationship with the State Government4. Work with and network with other groups in our state who are also seeking to Protect Children and/or protect the Constitutional Rights of all.

Poem

First they came for the Communists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.Then they came for the Catholics and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.Then they came for me, but by that time, no one was left to speak up.- Pastor Martin Niemoeller, Nazi Germany